A comparative study for double pass solar air collector utilizing medial glass panel

Abstract

A numerical investigation of thermal prediction of double-pass solar air heater of-counter flow is developed in the present study. The main idea of the current study is that the collector consists of two layers of glass so that the middle layer is glass instead of the usual metal plate. The performance of double-pass solar air heater is studied for a wide range of solar radiation intensities (600, 750 and 900 W/m2). A FORTRAN-90 program is built to simulate the mathematical model of double-pass solar air heater based on solving steady state two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations and energy equation based on finite volume method. Turbulence effect is simulated by two equations k-ε module. The results are compared with the results of a previous experimental study and a good agreement was found. From compression calculating efficiency of the present and traditional collector for each solar intensity, it was found that the efficiency of the current collector is higher than that of the traditional one, where the efficiency of the current collector at the solar intensity of (600, 750 and 900) W/m2 are (0.529, 0.514 and 0.503), respectively, while those of the traditional collector (0.508, 0.492 and 0.481), respectively. In addition to this, the effect of the mass flow rate on the temperature difference of the current proposed collector was studied. Three values of the mass flow rate were studied (0.009, 0.018, and 0.027) kg/s at solar intensity of 750 W/m2. From this it was found that the temperature difference decreases with increasing mass flow rate. Accordingly, the efficiency decreases.